What's Driving America's Gerontocracy?
American politics has an age problem, and it's getting worse. Why the driving force behind America's gerontocracy is a deep-seated advantage for incumbents, and what we can do about it.
This week, Senator Dianne Feinstein announced she would not run for re-election in 2024. Fittingly, the 89-year-old Senator from California was apparently unaware of the political development.
Regardless of your politics, Senator Feinstein has been nothing short of a groundbreaking political figure—Feinstein was the first woman to serve as the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, mayor of San Francisco, and senator of California, and the first woman to chair the Senate Rules Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee. The fact remains, however, that Feinstein is throwing in the towel years too late:
Questions about [Feinstein’s] mental capacity have circulated for years. During the 2018 Supreme Court nomination hearings for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, people who worked with her said she struggled to remember the names of staff aides. In 2020, amid questions about her ability to lead the powerful Judiciary Committee, she was forced out as the top Democrat on the panel, an episode that people close to her said was deeply disappointing for the senator, who believed she had done the work, had waited her turn and was fully competent to lead the panel.
Ms. Feinstein’s fiercest defenders concede that she sometimes needs to be told the same information multiple times, and she herself admits to forgetting conversations at times.
Although the great American gerontocracy is frequently covered by the media, the conversation usually starts and ends with the general acknowledgement that our politicians are getting older. That’s certainly true—the average age of the House is 58, about 9 years older than it was in 1980, while the average age of the Senate is now a youthful 64, which is about 12 years older than it was four decades ago.
This is a problem for some obvious reasons and other less obvious ones. For one, these people are supposed to be representative of the American public. Of course, we have a long way to go before we realize that ideal, but Congress is slowly chipping away at becoming more representative of America in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, education and religion. The one category that continues to trend in the wrong direction: age. Today, the average member of Congress is roughly 20 years older than the average American. A legislature that isn’t representative of the population it serves can hardly be expected to enact effective legislation targeted at the problems of today and, more importantly, those of tomorrow. In fact, not only is an aging legislative body ineffective, it’s actually detrimental to the country. A comparative study of European countries demonstrated that, when relatively older people control the political system, it creates an “old-age trap” that endangers long-run economic growth by “exclud[ing] new generations, who are reasonably the most dynamic and innovative part of the population, from the access to power.”
When the President’s State of the Union Address triggers visions of a retirement home rather than a vibrant political body, it also delegitimizes our political system in the eyes of the American public and abroad. Needless to say, the panoply of Biden gaffes over the last two years alone (from the bicycle tumble to falling asleep at the COP26 summit) does nothing to galvanize support from the electorate in the lead up to the 2024 election or strike fear in the eyes of Vladimir Putin (who, admittedly, seems to be having his own age-related health issues). In fact, Biden’s age is the number one reason Democratic voters cite for not wanting him to run again in 2024.
Finally, old legislators make out-of-touch legislation. Recall back in 2018, when Senator Orrin Hatch (then a spry 84 years old) asked Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook could “sustain a business model in which users don’t pay” for the service? A question so dumb that it caused Zuck—not known for his quick quips and smooth responses—to let out a big smirk before responding, “Senator, we run ads.” Don’t forget, then-Senator Hatch was the Chairman of the “Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force,” which I can only presume involved Hatch and his octogenarian buddies dressing up in matching Top Gun-esque uniforms and grilling Jeff Bezos about where he’s “hiding that woman Alexa.” The primary pieces of legislation leveraged today to oversee the conduct of tech companies (which represent nearly 40% of the S&P 500) are the Sherman Antitrust Act, enacted in 1890, and the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (which effectively immunizes tech platforms from third-party liability and was enacted 8 years before Facebook was created). And, while the dynamic duo of Senator Chuck Grassley (age 89) and Senator Amy Klobuchar (who, despite appearing younger, is 62, which is further testament to just how old her peers are) has endeavored to pass comprehensive antitrust legislation, their bill’s success seems unlikely given the current divide in Congress.
Some of you may be quite upset with this characterization of the American political system. Maybe you think that an older Congress can legislate just as well as a younger one. Maybe you even think that an older Congress can legislate better than a younger one (something to do with knowledge and wisdom, I guess). Setting aside the merits of an aging legislature, it is still an undeniable fact that the legislature is indeed aging. So, why is the legislature aging?
One common argument is that society is just getting older and living longer. For one, that’s not technically true. In fact, last year, life expectancy in the US dropped for the second straight year (down to 76 years old, which is a full 13 years shorter than the current age of dear Senator Feinstein). Even acknowledging that the average American now lives longer than he or she did in 1980 (which was 73 years old), Congress has aged at a rate three to four times as fast over the same period.
No, better healthcare and more veggies aren’t making all of our politicians old. The real problem is one that political scientists have studied for decades, but that has rarely been labeled as the cause of our aging Congress: the incumbency advantage.
The incumbency advantage (or incumbency bias) refers to the advantage that incumbents have over challengers. If you’re running for re-election in the House, you have, depending on the year, somewhere between an 85% and 98% chance of being re-elected. Your chances of winning re-election in the Senate are largely the same. In fact, in 2022, every single incumbent running for re-election in the Senate won.
The incumbency advantage is widely studied, but the basic rationale for the advantage is that the voting public is busy with their own lives and don’t really spend very much time digging into the candidates, so when the time comes to vote, they go with the name they know and trust (the devil you know, as they say). As the politician goes from a candidate, to an incumbent, to a rotting corpse, the politician finds it increasingly easy to amass political donations. In 2022, the average Senate incumbent raised nearly $30 million, compared with just over $2 million for their challenger. There are also concerns about incumbents taking advantage of redistricting (and, its ugly twin, gerrymandering) to cement their positions, but those are slightly tougher to quantify.
The point is: Our politicians are old because it’s easy for them to win re-election. Unlike the Supreme Court, Congress isn’t a lifetime appointment—but it might as well be. Californians didn’t elect Senator Feinstein to be their first female senator at age 89. She was elected senator at the age of 59 and just stuck around for a while.
There are plenty of potential solutions to the gerontocracy problem. Age limits are likely too draconian and would fail to account for the nuances of each individual legislator. But term limits, campaign finance reform, redistricting, and ranked-choice voting (or any combination thereof) are all possible tools we could use to reverse the spell of aging (in politics, I mean). The only obstacle? We’ll have to convince the very geriatrics we’ve elected to pass the legislation.
Great read.